Derek Van Diest, who is a reporter with the Edmonton Sun and NHL.com covering the Oilers was on TSN 1260 Monday morning, and he was asked about that team’s decision to hire blogger and stats expert Tyler Dellow (h/t to Twitter’s Greg Wyshynski and Yakov Mironov).

He didn’t hold back, and delivered an epic attack on not just Dellow but on the whole idea of using analytics to study sport.

As a member of the mainstream media, I think we’ve all been in [Dellow’s] sights. This is a guy that is very anti-mainstream media, it seems like. Everything we did was wrong, and we could do it better, and he wouldn’t be shy of going up against some of the mainstream media guys and saying ‘hey, what are you doing, this is how you should do your job’ and looking at us. Like ‘thanks, but we kind of know how to do our job’; it’s one of those things. I’m not a fan of the hiring, I don’t think a lot of people are a fan of the hiring; I think the bloggers are, you know, those guys that go down there and crunch these stats. I think they’re a fan because it kind of gives them a little vindication.

The nice thing about Van Diest’s opening is the way that he makes it clear he doesn’t have an objective opinion here. Dellow was frequently critical of mainstream reporters, and by god Van Diest remembers it. The lines between bloggers and mainstream reporter have gone blurry, or even non-existent in places, but Van Diest’s mind isn’t one of those places.

I think your organization is, from people on the outside, they look towards the organization and they see the characters you have in your organization and they see the people that you have in the organization. To me, is this really a guy that you want representing your organization, considering his past and what he’s done and how he’s been so vindictive and god forbid you disagree with one of his opinions because you’re obviously an idiot because you don’t think the way he thinks.

Personally, the first place that I start in assessing the capability of an analytics hire is character. And naturally, there’s no better judge of character than a man who just made it clear he holds a grudge against the guy he’s talking about.

Tyler Dellow is his own best self-promoter. No one is saying what a great guy Tyler Dellow is more than Tyler Dellow is. He’s saying ‘look at me, what a smart guy and what a great guy and look how much I know about the game.’

I don’ want to jump ahead here, but within five minutes Van Diest will explain that he saw Leon Draisaitl play twice last year and that was enough for him to know that this guy was a player.

Meanwhile, the fellow who writes for a stats-heavy website with no pictures is a self-promoter.

We’ve always said the same thing in the mainstream media and I think he came after us because we were actually there. We’re actually there, watching every game, watching every practice. And because we’re actually there, watching every game, watching every practice, we don’t have to go home and dissect all these stats. We can see when a guy’s a good player, when he’s not a good player.

Here we go: Van Diest finally starts getting to the crux of the matter, the uselessness of advanced stats. Naturally, one needs to open with an alternative, and here the alternative is obvious: watching games and practices live.

I’ve always contended this to a lot of people: When you’re at the game, and you’re in the pressbox, you see a lot of things that they don’t show you on TV. You see things away from the puck, you see guys playing away from the puck, you see how hard they get back on the backcheck. I remember talking to people about that once, and how many times have we seen Ales Hemsky turn around and head straight to the bench and change when the team is going back the other way? And we see those things, and those things don’t show up on a stats sheet, and then we say ‘well, Ales Hemsky, we don’t think is a very good player, these are some of the things he does’ and then these bloggers and these people on the stat sheet ‘well, his Corsi number is good and his plus/minus…” Yeah, but how many times could we count – and you’ve been there Marc [Majeau] – when the puck is turned over in the offensive zone and the puck comes back the other way, he heads towards the bench. That’s something that coaches see and scouts see and everybody sees, but the guy sitting at home watching TV doesn’t see, and that’s a big part of the game. We’re at practices, and how do we know practice is over? Because Ales Hemsky is the first guy off the ice. Oh, Ales Hemsky is leaving? He’s gone. He never worked extra on his game. And those are the things that we see and they don’t show up on the stats sheet.

Ales Hemsky is a fun test case for this kind of thinking. Hemsky’s had a rough few years in Edmonton, and seen himself bumped down the right wing depth chart in favour of Jordan Eberle and Nail Yakupov. He caught fire in Ottawa and was signed by the Dallas Stars to a three-year contract this summer. The Stars, apparently, didn’t spend enough time watching Hemsky in practice.

There are two parties squarely in Van Diest’s sights here. The first is people who watch the game via video, because they miss crucial things that people in the arena see. There’s an element of truth here – there’s a reason scouts like to show up in person – but the simple reality is that the vast majority of the game is caught on television. Often, that includes line changes; it doesn’t take a genius to know that the sudden appearance of a right wing who wasn’t on the ice a moment ago means that the other right wing went to the bench.

It’s also a problematic argument because, as anyone who has ever watched the NHL game in any amount of detail knows, teams change lines all the time following an offensive zone turnover – as long as the defencemen aren’t outnumbered it’s not the worst time to get fresh legs from the bench at the end of the long shift, particularly if the alternative is a tired five-man unit in the defensive zone.

The other party getting targeted here is the stats crowd. Van Diest argues that working hard in practice doesn’t show up on the stats sheet. He’s wrong, and here’s why: Players practice hard so they can have better results on the ice. Statistics measure results. If a player is working harder than anyone else in the gym, it will show up in improved results. It can be helpful to know that a player is performing well because he’s in tip-top shape (as opposed to, say, by way of his natural talent) but that’s far less important than knowing that a player is performing well in the first place.

Bringing him in, it seems like they’re appeasing Dallas Eakins. The Oilers are saying, ‘okay, Dallas, you’re a head coach, you can have the ingredients, all the ingredients you want. Bring in the assistants, bring in your guys; you’re not going to have any excuses if thing doesn’t work out. We’re going to give you everything [we] can, everything you want, in your power, to be successful.’ I think that’s what the Oilers are saying. ‘You want this you, you want this guy, you got this guy, bring them in, be successful. But if you’re not successful, then you can’t turn around and say to us, ‘hey, well I wasn’t given the tools to succeed here, and it didn’t work out.’ I think the Oilers basically are covering all their bases and saying ‘we want to be successful, we want this guy to be successful, let’s give him all the tools that he needs so that if it doesn’t work out he can’t turn around and say ‘well, I was never given the opportunity.’’ Because right now you can see he’s been given the opportunity by bringing in all the people that he wants to bring in.

Boiling this argument down to one sentence: Dallas Eakins may believe in this guy, but that doesn’t mean that Edmonton’s management group values analytics; they’re probably just doing him a favour. It’s a bad argument, because it ignores all the other teams out there hiring analytics guys. It’s also a bad argument, because Craig MacTavish has quoted analytic findings several times in pressers since he was hired. In other words, even if Van Diest was right it would be a poor defence; it’s just doubly sad because the evidence suggests otherwise.

Honestly, I do think that this will be a fad, and teams will realize that, ‘you know what, advanced stats are telling us what our scouts already have said.’

Uh-huh. Because if there’s anything that we’ve learned from other sports, it’s that once statistics are accepted by the establishment they don’t evolve and advance and get even stronger; they go away because teams see the lack of value in them. It’s what’s happened in baseball and it’s what’s happened in basketball. It’s why the NHL is experimenting with new technology to record more stats than ever before as quickly as possible.

Because this is a fad, and if reporters ignore it long enough it’ll just go away.

Teams, to me, if you’re going to spend money on player development and things like that, spend money on your scouting staff. Spend money on the guys evaluating the talent, guys that you have on the road and they’re lugging all these miles. At every level – at your pro scouting level – you’re spending a lot of money to fly these guys from city to city. You’re spending a lot of money on your amateur scouts, driving from town to town, watching these players pay. And that’s where the money should be spent. There’s no salary cap when it comes to scouting. There’s no salary cap when it comes to player development. They’re trying to find something that other teams don’t know.

Van Diest argues that the only salary cap is for players, and that teams should spend as much money as possible in their off-ice staff. He’s 100 percent right.

Where he’s 100 percent wrong is in the unwarranted assumption that the only places to spend that money are in scouting and player development.

But I think in reality, they’re going to look at these advanced stats and they’re going to show their scouts and they’re going to compare them to what their scouts have said. Like ‘Okay, the scout watched this guy play, and he tells us he’s a good player, and this advanced stat is just validating what the scouts do. Why do we need two sources that tell us the same thing?’ Who are you going to get rid of? You going to get rid of your scouts or you going get rid of your advanced stats guy? I think in a couple of years that’s going to happen.

According to Van Diest, stats can do two things: agree with the scouts, in which case they’re redundant, or disagree with the scouts, in which case they can’t be trusted. It’s an interesting comment, because it’s something that Eakins opined on just a few days ago.

Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins.

“When your gut tells you one thing, and the analytics are for or against it the other way, it starts the conversation,” the Oilers head coach said. “I’m not going to be quick to say, ‘that’s a bunch of crap, discard it, these guys don’t know what they’re doing’ and leave it. I’d much rather be the other way and go, ‘we’re going to move forward with this, we’ll see if it does help us’ and be considerate and open-minded to learning something new.”

In specific instances where eyeballs and analytics disagree, an intelligent man asks why the discrepancy exists and investigates further. Only a dunce looks at the disagreement and assumes he already knows the answer. That’s why Van Diest is wrong; NHL managers come from all kinds of different backgrounds, but there is no premium on the closed-minded.

I said this before on another radio show: I don’t even know how they come up with these stats. Who’s sitting down and figuring out Corsi? Is there someone actually watching every game and marking down every time there’s a dump-in or an opportunity or a blocked shot? Who’s out there watching these stats guys? Are these legitimate stats, or are they just trying to mold them into saying what they want to say?

This is where things get embarrassing. One would assume that an authority willing to dismiss statistics entirely is familiar with what they are and how they work; one would be wrong. Instead, Van Diest admits that he’s clueless about the process.

And yes, the answer is that there are actually guys sitting down and watching every game and recording numbers. They’re paid by the NHL, and they record the data in the league’s official play-by-play files. That’s where Corsi comes from. Then there are the stats people, who use those numbers and augment them with their personal viewing and in many cases their own manually-tracked numbers – numbers tracked by watching and rewatching and rewatching the game.

When a stat comes out and says, ‘this guy went into the corner X amount of times and came out of the corner X amount of times with the puck’ then maybe I’ll take a look at it; I think that’s a stat that’s valuable to me. When a stat starts measuring a guy’s work ethic and a guy’s heart and a guy’s character and a guy’s ability to rally teams in the room… what you’re doing is turning everything into a number and it’s not. Especially the game of hockey.

I actually wrote about this a few days ago: It’s incredibly hard to define character. One man’s great leader is another man’s cancer in the locker room. Perhaps Van Diest feels he has some mystical ability to read the hearts of hockey players. He doesn’t; nobody does.

But his first example – of a stat that counts how often a guy wins puck battles in the corners – would be incredibly easy to compile. All he’d have to do is watch the games and count. Stats guys don’t do a lot of this because the connection between winning more battles in the corner and scoring more goals than the other team is indirect – winning a battle in the corner doesn’t help matters if it doesn’t result in a shot attempt or prevent a shot attempt. Something like Corsi, which measures shot attempts, is far more valuable because the connection to scoring more goals than the other team is immediate and direct.

That’s not to say that Van Diest’s idea is worthless; the more information we have the better off we all are. It’s just work, and there’s a ton of manual tracking work to do and very few stats people to do it all. Van Diest could help by tracking it himself, but evidently he doesn’t see it as having enough value.

Hockey’s a very fluid game. If you know that your guy’s going to go into the corner for the puck and he’s going to come out of it with it, that’s a guy you want on your team. What stat is going to say, ‘so-and-so comes out of the puck with the corner more often than he doesn’t?’ He’s winning those one-on-one battles. I know a lot of these advanced stats guys, they don’t take into account those one-on-one battles and they say ‘well those are just breaks and bounces.’ No, you make your own bounces, you make your own breaks. The guys that work hardest in the weight room in the summer are the guys that are going to win those one-on-one battles, and that’s something you have to see for yourself. No stat’s going to tell me ‘so-and-so is going to win this one-on-one battle.’ I think that’s one of the big reasons why I’m not a fan of the advanced stats.

Again: this is very easy to track. Watch the game and manually track puck battles.

Van Diest thinks this is an argument against the usefulness of advanced stats, and he couldn’t be more wrong. All it says is that he thinks the analytics community is quantifying the wrong things, but that he’s incapable of doing it himself.

Basically, he has half the equation. Lots of stats guys haven’t been happy with just the data provided by the NHL, so they’ve manually tracked other things – like zone entries and exits and scoring chances and Neilson numbers and myriad others. The critical difference between a guy like Dellow (who watched a ton of video to augment official play-by-play records) and a guy like Van Diest is that Dellow was willing to put the work in when the data didn’t exist; Van Diest is content to say data is useless.

We all know hockey well enough that we can tell a good player.

Cameron Abney (Steven Christy/Oklahoma City Barons)

This is a good time to remind readers that Van Diest knew hockey well enough to tell us that Cameron Abney “has all the tools to be an effective power forward.” One paragraph earlier, he noted that Abney had a goal and three assists in 48 games, but he knew better than the numbers.

It takes incredible arrogance to say that we all know the game well enough to correctly weight individual players. Everyone – even the most seasoned hockey men – make mistakes along the way; if they didn’t there wouldn’t be a market for undrafted free agents because the scouts would have pegged them all correctly at age 18.

We can tell who’s a good player, who’s not a good player, who sees the game, the vision that he has. Leon Draisaitl: I saw him play twice last year. I said, ‘this guy has vision, he knows the game, he knows where to be on the ice, he knows where to go on the ice,’ and he’s actually playing above what his teammates were, because his teammates would go to the front of the net and all of a sudden the puck was on their stick.

Well, hey, why do the Oilers even need to pay all these scouts? Watch a guy for two games and the answers are right there.

Where’s the stat for that? Where’s the stat for vision and for basically intellect when it comes to the game?

And that’s the fundamental misunderstanding that powers Van Diest’s entire rejection of statistics; the idea that it’s either/or. No credible stats guy advocates an NHL team firing all of its scouts and replacing them with spreadsheets; similarly, no credible voice on the other side of the conversation dismisses analytics as completely useless.

Analytics are useful. Scouting is useful. The idea that one or the other is the only way to go isn’t just outdated, it’s a strawman argument that’s never really been advanced by serious people.

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